Take any person in the world and you will probably find that he or she is constantly accessing different goods and/or different services. By way of example only, each time we take a cup of coffee, we access goods (i.e. a cup filled with coffee) and a service (i.e. the preparation of coffee). While some of these goods and/or services can be made available to anybody (e.g. a newspaper put at the disposal of passengers at metro or train stations free of charge or on a publicly available website), access to some other goods and/or services can be controlled in order to be able to guarantee that only authorised users can effectively access these goods and/or services.
A restricted access to goods or services can be required for various reasons. In some cases, goods or services can only be accessed by persons of a certain age. This category of goods and/or services includes e.g. pornographic or particularly violent content but also alcoholic or narcotic substances. In some other cases, it could be necessary to restrict access to goods or services based on the personal identification of the user (e.g. a user other than the owner of a boarding pass is not allowed to board an aircraft). Finally, access to goods and/or services is normally only available to those persons who have paid the corresponding purchase price.
In this last case, the access to goods or services cannot be obtained unless a predefined purchase price has been paid. Purchase points can comprise standard stores or shops where goods or services can be obtained in exchange for either real money (i.e. paper banknotes or metal coins) or some electronic payment means (e.g. a credit card or a debit card). Also, goods and/or services can also be obtained at so-called automated points of sale comprising in particular so-called vending machines or any other similar distribution devices. Vending machines of this kind can generally also accept paper or metal money, credit or debit cards, or some kind of tokens issued specially for this purpose. More sophisticated machines also allow accessing goods and/or services using any kind of electronic wallet, for example rechargeable chips, mobile phones (or other similar devices).
However, all current methods and systems for acquiring goods and/or services have some drawbacks. For example, conventional stores or shops cannot be run without employees who are in charge of the payment procedure and who control access to the goods and/or services. On the other hand, automated points of sale do not have this disadvantage since they do not require the presence of people in charge of payment procedure and access, but they nevertheless still require personnel, e.g. for emptying the repository for banknotes, coins or tokens.
Also, if automated points of sale do not offer the possibility to access goods and/or services using money, but only using cards, chips, badges or other similar electronic payment means, a wired or wireless data connection to a central unit must in general be provided in order to identify the user and/or to verify sufficient amount of credit for accessing the goods and/or services. Also, if rechargeable chips, badges or similar devices are used, recharge points for the devices must be provided for, which again requires further costly infrastructure. Finally, the production costs of such rechargeable devices are not negligible.